Profile : Tough Guys Do Change : After a close call with death a year ago, Kirk Douglas takes more time to think about his choices

By SUSAN KING

April 19, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Kirk Douglas put up his best tough-guy front when he received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award a year ago, just weeks after he was nearly killed when a helicopter he was riding in collided with a light plane near Santa Paula.

The night of the AFI dinner, Douglas recalled, “I was aching. I had makeup covering my black eye. My back was so sore. I was just trying to play it macho.”

These days, the father of Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas and the star of such classics as “The Champion,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Lust for Life” and “Spartacus,” seems to be fully recovered.

“Yeah,” Douglas, 75, said matter-of-factly. “I play golf.”

Before a recent interview, Douglas showed off the prized Picasso vase on display in his foyer and the modern art that adorns the walls of his Beverly Hills home.

As he propped his leg on the living room coffee table so as not to awaken Banshee, his Golden Labrador asleep at his feet, Douglas acknowledged the accident changed his outlook on career and life.

“I am lucky,” he said. “I am living on borrowed time. It’s a hell of a thing to have that behind you. It has had a big impact. It gets you thinking about a lot of things about what you want to do and what you don’t want to do.

“It gives you a feeling that so much of life is beyond your control. Why do things happen? You go up in a helicopter and suddenly a plane hits you. (The two men in the plane died. The helicopter’s pilot, Noel Blanc, son of the late Mel Blanc, suffered serious injuries.)

“There is a sort of destiny you can’t control. There is only so much within your control. All you can do is deal with the elements within your control.”

One of the elements within his control, Douglas said, is to be “more discriminating about what movie you want to do, what book you want to write. It is within my control what movie I want to do. A lot of it is not within my control to guarantee the movie is a success. So you just realize your limitations in a sense and you deal with that.”

While Douglas was in the hospital after the accident, he received the script to Sunday’s CBS drama “The Secret,” in which he plays Mike Dunmore, one of the most popular residents of a small Cape Cod town who for years has kept it a secret that he can’t read or write. Even his family doesn’t know about his secret, and it has caused a lifelong resentment between him and his only son (Bruce Boxleitner).

When Mike’s young grandson Danny (Jesse R. Tendler) begins to have problems at school, he recognizes Danny has the same affliction. When Mike finally musters the courage to get tested, he learns he and Danny suffer from the reading disorder dyslexia.

“I was fascinated with it,” Douglas said of “The Secret.” “It is a more gentle role and a different kind of character. One of the things I could relate to was that my father was an illiterate Russian peasant. He never had a chance to go to school or learn to read or write. While I was doing that I thought there must have been a lot of times when he was in that same situation of bluffing and pretending, not wanting someone to know.”

At the time of this interview, Michael Douglas’ controversial new movie “Basic Instinct” was just hitting the theaters and already drawing big crowds with its steamy sex scenes. Kirk had yet to see it.

“I’m dying to see it,” he said. “I am sure besides being sexually explicit, it is a good movie.”

Douglas chuckled. “I have done movies where I exposed my bottom,” he recalled. In 1967’s “The War Wagon,” he wore just his holsters in one scene. “That was considered pretty racy stuff.”

While standing atop a moving train, he mooned a a police helicopter in 1986’s “Tough Guys.” “That was my suggestion,” Douglas said, smiling.

The biggest controversy Douglas was involved in was when he broke the McCarthy era blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write “Spartacus.” Douglas said he didn’t announce Trumbo was the screenwriter until the 1960 film was nearly completed.

“At that time, the hypocrisy bothered me,” he said. “All the studios were using blacklisted writers but they just looked the other way and (the writers) used a phony name. It annoyed me.” So Douglas decided one day to openly leave a pass for Dalton Trumbo at the gate of Universal Studios.

Universal, Douglas said, was not happy. “If it was a stronger studio they might have fought me. But I fought it too strongly. Hedda Hopper was condemning me, and when the movie came out there were a few people picketing.”

Douglas said he doesn’t have the same passion for acting as he did in the past. “It has changed,” he said. “When I look back, I was crazy. I was doing like three movies (a year). I was always working. I was always developing stories and producing so many of the things.”

Producing paved the way for his latest career as a writer. Four years ago he received glowing reviews for his best-selling autobiography “The Ragman’s Son,” and two years ago he published his first novel, “Dance with the Devil.”

“I never thought of myself as a writer but I always like working with the writers,” Douglas said. “But now I have passion for writing. I just finished my second novel, ‘The Gift.’ I don’t have any desire to make a movie unless it is something that moves me.”

He is excited with the prospect of making a movie with Michael. “We have talked often about doing a movie together,” he said. “We think we have something we’re working on and if it comes off, we will do it together. I have never done a movie with Michael and he has never worked with me. I often lie in bed and think, ‘Jeez. That would be exciting to walk on the stage and do a movie together.’ That would be fun.”

“The Secret” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.